SOPA
Yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the deceptively named Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Representative Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) introduced the bill on October 26, 2011 as H.R.3261. SOPA expands the Internet censorship provisions of the Protect IP Act, a bill Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) shepherded into law earlier this year. These additional restrictions make it easier for large corporations to stop websites from getting paid, not for just allegedly infringing content, but for all content on the website, even if the alleged infringement makes up only a tiny part of the website’s content. SOPA threatens not only to censor a small amount of allegedly infringing content, but a lot of non-infringing online content along with it. The result will be a law much better suited to punishing entities that disagree with the entertainment industry’s vision of a censored Internet than stopping piracy.

Job Killer
Michael O’Leary, representing the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the film industry trade group, argues the motion picture and television industry supports jobs. Google, Facebook, Twitter, venture capitalist, civil liberties groups and trade associations say just the opposite. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has even labeled SOPA a “massive piece of job-killing internet regulation.”
Several members of Congress not swayed by entertainment industry contributions have come together in bi-partisan fashion to defeat SOPA, warning that SOPA will result in an “explosion of innovation-killing lawsuits and litigation [...] At a time of continued economic uncertainty, this legislation will result in fewer new businesses, fewer new investments, and fewer new jobs.”
Won’t SOPA Stop “Pirates”
I don’t know what your definition of a pirate is, but my definition does not YouTube, just because one person uploaded a video of their kid playing with a puppy, while a portion of a copyrighted song played in the next room. But SOPA does not discriminate. SOPA does not require a judge or jury to decide what does and what does not constitutes piracy before an alleged “victim” unilaterally shuts down an entire website. As for the pirates? SOPA will do little more to stop pirates. SOPA is like continuing to reduce the speed limit for everyone, because one or two criminals keep driving through town at 100mph. You are only punishing the people already following the law. Large scale pirates depicted in industry advertisements are clandestine and mobile, creating their own closed networks. Even if the industry were to spend time tracking pirates down and shutting off their access, these “real” pirates would be back up and running on a new private network within hours. The entertainment industry knows this and knows it is much easier to target legitimate companies, where alleged infringement may make up less than 1% of their online activity, than to focus on dedicated criminals, where infringement makes up the majority of their online activity.

Won’t SOPA Help Artists
While entertainment industry giants are in favor of SOPA, many individual artists are not. Smaller artists understand “piracy” for what it is, “a symptom of a new technology (the internet) that many haven’t yet understood how to monetize.” SOPA is trying to use twentieth century legislation to thwart twenty-first century technology. SOPA makes the internet more difficult to use, while pirates continue to make content easier to steal. The solution is not to make things harder for the good people. The key is to make it easier for them to obtain content legally. While it is not clear what the new paradigm will look like, services like Spotify, Pandora, Rdio and Grooveshark are embracing new technology and giving us a glimpse of more artist and consumer friendly alternatives.

So Who Do SOPA the The Protect IP Act Benefit?
If campaign donations are any indication, the entertainment industry and certain members of Congress will be the primary beneficiaries of the new internet censorship embodied by SOPA. The MPAA is no longer playing coy. Pushing for the new Internet censorship at yesterday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing, O’Leary tried to address the argument that SOPA would frustrate the implementation of a more secure domain name protocol, namely DNSSEC, stating “this argument conveniently ignores not only the history of the creation of DNSSEC but also the very nature of Internet protocols, which is simply this: when new developments or circumstances require changes to these codes, the codes change,” And just who is responsible for making these changes? Well, the second biggest industry donor to Senator Patrick Leahy’s (Protect IP Act) election campaign committee, and the biggest donor to Representative Lamar Smith’s (SOPA) election campaign committee, are both the TV/Movies/Music industry. So if it turns out you have a problem with the protocols implemented by either SOPA or the Protect IP Act, and the MPAA does not, how likely do you think it is that those protocols are going to change?

What Can You Do?
Do not let this bill pass. Do not let the movie and recording industries punish artists and fans and dictate which websites you can visit. Do not let corporate behemoths use taxpayer resources to shut down taxpayer websites. Tell your Congressional representative this bill is a job-killer, tell them it punishes artists as well as consumers.

You can find phone numbers and email addresses for your representatives here. If you need a script, you can use anything from this post and/or your own version of the following:

“Hello [Representative's name],

My name is [your name] and I am calling from [your city and state] to voice my concern about SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. I do not believe this bill should be passed. The United States already has several laws in place for combating piracy, including the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 2007 PRO-IP Act, the 2011 Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and others. This bill is a job-killer. I urge you to listen to your constituents, many of whom will be adversely affected by this bill, and vote “No” on the Stop Online Piracy act. Thank you.”

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